Don’t hold your breath for Samsung Pay

If you’re waiting for Samsung Pay, you might want to put on a pot of coffee, because it could be a long one.

Far from getting the jump on the long-awaited Apple Pay, it seems that Samsung is also lagging behind with the release of its own mobile payment service, Samsung Pay.

Rhee In Jong, the company’s Executive Vice President, revealed on Wednesday during a meeting with investors that the service wouldn’t be rolled out until at least September, not July as previously thought.

Samsung has made all the right moves in the run-up to the service’s launch, from partnering with both Visa and MasterCard and acquiring LoopPay, to making its services compatible with up to 90 per cent of the current magnetic card reading technology already out there.

According to Claire Kim, an analyst at Daishin Securities Co. “The new service will likely be deployed on its next Galaxy Note device. The key is how fast Samsung will be able to expand the service to lower-end devices.”

With Google, Apple and PayPal all competing in the race to be the first to roll out widespread and user-friendly technology to allow consumers to make purchases both online and in shops, there’s definitely a payment service out there for everyone, although there’s been varied success so far.

Apple Pay is currently backed by more than 2,500 banks in the US and Google Wallet is supported by around 700,000 retailers across the Atlantic, according to an announcement made on 28th May.

Quite when any of this will be available in the UK, or indeed the rest of Europe, remains to be seen, although word has it that American tourists with Apple Pay already set up can use the service to pay for their travel on Transport for London terminals by simply tapping their phones against the readers, so it seems that Apple is making inroads – even if they are trudgingly slow ones

We’re not able to predict what this delay might mean for Samsung’s declining market share, which has taken a hammering from Apple’s popularity, but given the fact that Forrester Research Inc. predicts that the mobile payment market will be worth $142 billion by 2019, the South Korean company will need to pull its finger out in order to get a decent slice of the pie.